AT ONCE THE routine of days changed.
Theodore had intended to visit Major Price-Evans immediately after the ceremony, to find out what it all meant and how it affected him and his friends; but he was too shaken to resist Lung’s demand that they should return to the guest-house, so now he was kneeling on the floor and pumping the primus stove, while Lung sat withdrawn and brooding on his cot. In theory Theodore was getting ready to welcome Mrs Jones after her adventure, but really he was trying to restore his own centre of balance by contact with things he knew, by handling a western gadget and making tea the way Mrs Jones liked it. He had just got the flame to roar and steady when Tomdzay came striding through the door with no warning at all. He beckoned to Theodore.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘You are needed.’
‘Where is Mrs Jones?’ said Lung and Theodore together.
‘The Mother of the Tulku is in the house of the Lama Amchi Geshe Rimpoche. It is there that we go.’
As Lung took a pace towards the door Tomdzay barred his way.
‘Only the Guide is needed,’ he said. ‘The much-honoured Father of the Tulku may stay here.’
He made a slight movement, not enough to let Lung pass but enough to make sure he could see the three soldier-monks waiting beyond the door. Lung took a half-pace towards them, hesitated and turned.
‘Not permit Missy think she strongest,’ he muttered in English.
Theodore smiled bleakly at him and followed Tomdzay out of the door.
This time they entered through the main gate of the monastery. The crowd was still streaming out, but whatever the crush they jostled aside to let Tomdzay pass; it took Theodore a little while to realize that their eyes were turned not on Tomdzay but on him. He was used to being stared at on his wanderings through the monastery, by eyes inquisitive but wary, but these stares were different, open and respectful – they might have stared at one of their idols in much the same way.
When the little procession he was now part of reached the main courtyard there were still plenty of people about, who behaved as though they had been waiting to see him, not pushing close as they had round Mrs Jones but forming a wide clear path between two packed lines of watchers. Tomdzay led the way down the centre of this space to the flights of stairs that zigzagged up the rock towards the two houses that stood there. One of these, Major Price-Evans had said, belonged to the Lama Amchi and the other was kept in permanent readiness for the return of the Lama Tojing or the arrival of his successor.
The escorting monks stopped at the bottom of the stair, but Tomdzay led the way up to the door of the left-hand house where he paused and whispered a brief prayer or incantation, then held the door open for Theodore.
‘Enter,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Be reverent.’
Automatically Theodore returned his solemn bow and crossed the threshold. As the door closed behind him his immediate impression was of yet another temple, not of stone but of wood, all polished to gleam in the near dark, and cluttered with jewelled idols and ornaments, and hung with garish cloths. Butter lamps glowed in front of some of the idols and the still air prickled with incense, but not so heavily as it did in the temple – the smell was thinner, or perhaps finer.
‘Coo-ee, Theo,’ called Mrs Jones’s voice. ‘We’re up here. Come and look. I never seen such a view.’
Theodore followed the sound up a flight of stairs, polished till they were as slippery as an ice-fall. At the top was a little vestibule, beyond which he found a large airy room which ran all across the front of the house with its windows looking out over the monastery roofs to the tremendous range beyond. This room too glistened with polish and twinkled with knick-knacks and idols.
In the many hours he was to spend there with Mrs Jones and the Lama Amchi, Theodore never became used to the nudging presences of the idols, whispering in his mind, You have felt us. You have known our power. We are real. He could look at a particular statue and perceive that it was mere stone, lacquered and gilded; its staring eyes had no mind behind them, its expression was whatever the sculptor had thought proper to carve there; that was all it consisted of. But out of his direct line of vision the idols were never quite empty; behind each half-seen mask a power brooded. Most of the Lama Amchi’s statues were of the Buddha, and so were the innumerable pictures in the hangings and paintings. All these seemed to express a strange multiple being; it was as though Theodore was being watched by an eye, many-faceted like an insect’s, but turned not outward but inward, inspecting through all those facets the object – Theodore – at its centre. Furthermore the silver or brass bowls and the butter lamps and the bright-patterned rugs and cushions and the hundreds of other garish or glittering objects, each with its own meaning and use and all bright with jewels and gold, served to increase the feeling of light refracted and splintered so that the eye could watch not only from all possible angles but in all possible hues. Sometimes Theodore could close a facet off, as if drawing a blind across a window. He might learn, for instance, the symbolism of an object or the myth behind a particular pose of the Buddha, and by refusing to accept them he could rob a presence of some of its power; but it would still be there, and much as he longed to he was never able to deny the whole vast system of beliefs and myths and symbols. Even if he had had the knowledge and intelligence to understand it all – and there was so much of it, so sharp and intricate in detail, so vague and ungraspable in outline – Theodore knew he would not have been able to argue it out of existence. You needed more than understanding for that. You needed a sort of spiritual energy, a soul-force, such as Father had possessed. The Lama Amchi possessed it too, and so did Mrs Jones, but not Theodore.
He found Mrs Jones sitting on a wide, low stool with her back to the window; she was still wearing her hat and veil and had managed to rearrange her hair and dress after the wild ride through the courtyard below. The Lama Amchi sat facing her on a great throne-like chair of black wood with sides as tall as its back and a rainbow-coloured canopy above. The back of the chair was deeply carved with the sacred wheel, whose spokes and rim framed the Lama’s head like a dark halo. He sat cross-legged on the plain wood seat, a pose which made him look like a toy neatly folded into its box. Later Theodore learnt that whenever he was not occupied with some other duty he spent all his time in this position on this chair, and slept in it too.
The Lama greeted Theodore with a face that seemed to smile, though his lips did not move, and pointed to a smaller stool beside Mrs Jones’s. Unlike the great wheel-throne, this was comfortably padded, a point which Theodore hardly noticed at the time but became increasingly grateful for as the weeks went by. They sat in silence for some time, the Lama gazing into distance beyond the mountain-tops, and Mrs Jones staring at him as though she were about to paint his portrait. Theodore glanced uneasily from one to the other wishing that Mrs Jones would say something in English so that he could begin to tell her of his determination not to be tricked any further into the maze of heathen fantasies.
‘How weak is the intellect of man,’ said the Lama suddenly. ‘When I met you in the pass I was given sure signs that my search had ended, but I was blind to a full half of them, or saw them in a mistaken light. Because I thought at first that you, child, might be the Tulku, I believed that your companion, the Chinese, must be the guide of whom the oracle spoke. And though I soon discovered that the Tulku is yet to be born, I was too blinded by my first perceptions to see that it is you who are the guide. It is you who are to guide the Mother of the Tulku to me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Theodore. ‘Mrs Jones is here.’
‘Not all journeys are across space. Two consciousnesses may be far apart in the dimensions of earth and yet side by side in the dimensions of the spirit; two bodies may share one room, while their consciousnesses are separated as if by many mountain ranges. Now say this to the Mother of the Tulku. I will speak slowly and pause often, so that you may make my meaning sure. The oracle confirms that she bears a child, and that he will be the Tulku of the Siddha Asara, who in his last incarnation wore the body of Tojing Rimpoche. That much is certain, though the Ones who speak through the oracle use shadowy language. The oracle also repeated the signs that were to assure us that we had found the Tulku, and when it confronted the Mother of the Tulku it recognized the presence of Asara and shrank before him. It warned, too, in dark language, of dangers and betrayals to come – these will become clear as the wheel turns. And it gave us a further sign, which is not for us but for the Mother of the Tulku, that she may know whose body she bears. We interpret certain words as meaning that the Siddha Asara willed the death of the body of Tojing Rimpoche at a propitious moment, only a moon and a half gone by, and chose for his new incarnation a child that was newly conceived at the foot of a pillar beneath a foreign shrine. Was it so?’